Denver’s KUSA won both Station Excellence and News Excellence honors. KUSA also picked up awards for topical documentary, “After Aurora” by Chris Vanderveen and Journalistic Enterprise for “Lila’s Daddy” by Vanderveen.

KDVR was honored for its Evening Newscast, KMGH picked up honors for its morning newscast.

Five broadcasters were inducted into the Heartland Chapter’s Silver Circle, for 25 years of outstanding contribution to the television industry. This year’s inductees: John Goheen, for years with KMGH as a videojournalist; Anne Trujillo, KMGH anchor; Greg Moody, formerly Critic-at-Large for KCNC; Mike LeClaire, photographer at KMGH, and Ken Miller, executive producer with ROOT Sports Rocky Mountain.

The Cannabist, The Denver Post’s offshoot website dedicated to marijuana coverage, will be the subject of a forthcoming feature-length documentary from the Denver Documentary Collective. The film “Rolling Papers,” a chronicle of Colorado’s cannibis culture, is currently in production. Producers will launch a Kickstarter campaign this week.

The Kickstarter campaign will be unveiled online on 4/20 to finance the effort. (The 4/20 celebration, long the high holiday of the pot legalization movement, is expected to draw the biggest crowd ever in Denver this year.)

The “Rolling Papers” team: director Mitch Dickman and director of photography Zachary Armstrong of Listen Productions and producers Britta Erickson, Daniel Junge, Karl Kister, Alison Greenberg Millice and Katie Shapiro. Junge and Greenberg Millice previously won the Academy Award for best documentary short in 2012 for “Saving Face,” about brutal acid attacks on women in Pakistan.

For info about the Kickstarter campaign and to support the project check the film’s website. “Rolling Papers” is slated for completion this fall.

Ricardo Baca, recently named marijuana editor for The Denver Post, chatted with Barbara Walters and the gang on ABC’s syndicated daytime show, “The View,” Tuesday. Only Whoopi seemed interested in pursuing the conversation regarding the various strains of weed currently under review by the website, The Cannabist. And only Whoopi was curious when Baca mentioned hiring additional marijuana critics. But all chimed in with questions about Colorado’s newly legal recreational drug.

Interestingly, they got past the superficial joking that has undermined other interview attempts and inquired about the basics: What qualified Baca to be the weed editor? (former music critic for 12 years!) Are you encouraging pot use? What do you say to people who hate the very idea of legalized weed?

Baca was at ease taking a journalistic stance, neither encouraging nor discouraging but reporting on the legal, political and cultural aspects of the new Colorado reality. He’s had so much practice with these national media interviews, he’s starting to look like he belongs.

For 15 years, the Denver Post and KUSA had a deal in place affording shared use of editorial resources on certain projects, cross-promotional opportunities and access to each others’ news meetings. That partnership ended in May.

A new deal is now in place between the Post and KMGH, affording a similar collaboration, with an emphasis on shared video. The Post and the 7News reporting teams have been meeting for several weeks.

“We are excited about the ability to use their video on our website,” Post Editor Greg Moore said this week, noting the paper is “moving aggressively into video.” Moreover, he cited his appreciation for “the aggressive hard-hitting journalism” Channel 7 does.

7News VP and General Manager Byron Grandy emphasized commonalities between the two news operations. “These two newsrooms are deeply committed to investigative reporting and creating impactful journalism that’s a positive influence on the community.” While the ability to expose stories to other platforms (ie. online) is important, Grandy said, the “very similar missions and commitments” to journalism are the driving forces behind the partnership.

The bosses aren’t talking about it, but clearly the sharing of video was a sticking point in the 9News deal.

The Scripps Howard Awards, honoring the best in national journalism since 1953, today named The Denver Post and KMGH as top award winners for 2012. Coverage of two major Colorado events that were national news stories, the mass theater shooting and the wildfires, earned the outlets top honors.

The Denver Post won the award in the breaking news category and will be honored with $10,000 and a trophy for coverage of the Aurora theater shooting. Denver’s 7News won the TV/Cable in-depth local coverage award, and will pick up $10,000 and the Jack R. Howard Award for “Investigating the Fire,” which uncovered governmental mismanagement of the 2012 wildfires.

An awards program book and video featuring the winners’ work will be online at www.scripps.com/foundation after the May 9 presentations in Naples, Fla.

Oh dear. Rosie O’Donnell has done me the honor of posting my Sunday column on her blog. However Rosie O’Donnell has done me the disservice of editing my Sunday column for her blog. Not only is this annoying (she took out the references to Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Phil Donahue, for instance), it’s a violation of the Denver Post’s copyright. I’ll leave any resolution of this to the folks who live and breathe at a much higher pay grade. Note from jo to ro, it was enough of a rave as it was.

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.